Restaurant AI Adoption: Why Even Accurate Technology Can Fail Without Trust

00:00 — Michael Beck:

Hey, everybody. Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, whatever time you happen to be finding us today. It’s Michael Beck, Chad Horn, Anthony Presley here on the Chat GTM podcast, coming to you for the very last time from the FSTech 2026 show here in Dallas, Texas at the Gaylord Texan. It’s been a wild three days of technology, people, thought, leadership and fun. You never know what’s going to happen next year. But you. The, the. We’ve had so many talks that have been about the businesses have come through and obviously very important and also the restaurants that, that they serve. But today we, you know, this session here is something a little special because it’s honestly three friends sitting down together, talking a little bit about the business that they have.

 

00:48 — Michael Beck:

But also we’re going to give you kind of a snapshot of what we saw at the show, things that we heard. And specifically, our friend Anthony Presley is sitting with us today. He dabbles in two different places. He’s his. He’s the CEO of a company called Time Forge. He’s also CTO of a company called C North Star. All play very beautifully together, in fact. But for the moment, let’s go ahead and talk a little bit about FS Tech 2026. What you saw, what you heard, what was exciting and maybe without naming names, what was the subject that wasn’t so exciting or maybe overplayed out overdrawn trope that we keep hearing over and over again that might not be panning the gold we’re looking for. Right. So first off, ap, outside of we’re all tired.

 

01:31 — Anthony Presley:

That’s a heck of an intro. That’s a heck of an intro.

 

01:34 — Michael Beck:

I’ll let you get some. We got going. How you doing today?

 

01:38 — Anthony Presley:

I am, I’m at about 35% at the moment, but I’m. I’m good. I’m good. It’s a lot of. It’s a lot of. I mean, I’m a natural. I think a little bit of an introvert, as I think a lot of tech people are. And then, and then you throw a thousand people and you’re, you know, talking and it’s every conversation. So, yeah, I’m good though. I mean, this is a lot.

 

01:59 — Chad Horn:

It’s.

 

01:59 — Anthony Presley:

It’s energizing, ultimately. Lots of new stuff. Lots of old stuff with new skin on it. Yes, lots of old stuff and not a new skin on it. I mean, there’s a lot of. All the things are here.

 

02:10 — Michael Beck:

Nothing new stuff with old skin though.

 

02:12 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah.

 

02:13 — Michael Beck:

So, ap, why don’t you give us a little bit of insider’s view on what you saw when you’re walking the floor today and some of the conversation or the last couple days were walking the floor and the conversations you’re having. Let’s start with what’s exciting you about where we are today as the industry, as technology and as people that share solutions with the, with the industry out there.

 

02:35 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah. I think one of the very interesting things that I saw was a number of the vendors giving, we’ll call it choice, Choice. And so you have the ability. It, it appears that a number of folks are going, hey, look, and by the way, every vendor at FSTECH is like data, right? Data is the thing. We gotta have the data. It’s the king. And, and there seems to be a little bit of a mad rush for everybody to be like the, all the data. But I think there are a number of vendors that are going, hey, we don’t want to be the vendor broker, we are the data broker. We want to give choice. So we’re collecting the data we have and then we’re opening that up, an API, an mcp, some way to get that data back out.

 

03:24 — Anthony Presley:

And I don’t know that I had seen that in the last couple of years. It’s been a lot of like once it’s in my walled garden.

 

03:31 — Michael Beck:

Right.

 

03:31 — Anthony Presley:

And so I think there is some folks that are now offering that up as choice, which I think is very good.

 

03:37 — Chad Horn:

Probably got a lot of feedback on previous positioning and yeah, wisened up.

 

03:42 — Anthony Presley:

I think that’s probably it. And now I think there’s some tricky things around who owns the data. Even though you can get to it. I think there’s some things that people should probably read their agreements very well. But, but yeah, I think that was kind of cool.

 

03:58 — Michael Beck:

Are you talking in the sense of there’s a term that you use being held hostage by your data, if you want to go somewhere it doesn’t belong to you, now what do you do?

 

04:05 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, I think that’s it. And I think that comes into play with some of these AI decision making processes. Right. So if I want to hook up my CLAUDE code to something that’s going to read my transaction data and make a decision and then talk to something else and execute an action like send an email, there’s an alert, there was too large of a POS transaction. Simple thing.

 

04:30 — Michael Beck:

Sure.

 

04:30 — Anthony Presley:

But like maybe you don’t even own the Data that came out of the pos, like that’s a. Or you own it, but you can’t transform it, or you can’t resell it because it’s not really yours. You just have a license to it. And so I think as you’re using SaaS, provider products in the world of AI, you kind of got to be careful about that. But more folks seem to be open to making that a choice that an operator can choose to do.

 

04:55 — Michael Beck:

Do you think that’s an expanded conversation now because of the critical dependency the AI has on that data foundation?

 

05:02 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, I think so. And I think that. I think that it probably requires a reasonable legal team that most operators probably are not thinking about.

 

05:12 — Michael Beck:

It’s a legal.

 

05:13 — Anthony Presley:

It’s a legal issue, right? That’s right.

 

05:16 — Chad Horn:

Got one in their pocket.

 

05:17 — Anthony Presley:

That’s right. Yeah.

 

05:18 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

05:18 — Anthony Presley:

How hard can this be? Right.

 

05:19 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

05:20 — Anthony Presley:

Kind of gets into some of the compliance stuff. Like, you know, it’s as you look at like, I mean, something really simple, trivial that most folks do. You hire an employee, you have an i9. Yep. You have to fill out some forms. You know, there’s. It turns out there’s a lot of security around that data that needs to happen, that needs to be auditable, that if you have an ice, you know, audits that gets done around that you need to know every employee that touched it, that looked at it by field. And. And so yeah, that can. That can come with a serious fines if you’re not careful. So yeah, I think just the data in general and not just having the data, but having optionality of the data and who owns the data. Again, back to the choice.

 

06:05 — Michael Beck:

What was exciting though in there? What was like something that’s something new or is there. Was there anything new under the sun this year?

 

06:10 — Anthony Presley:

Did you see the puppies?

 

06:12 — Chad Horn:

I did see the puppies. I did not. I only saw pictures of them.

 

06:15 — Michael Beck:

I saw the kennel actually and I saw pictures of. I didn’t actually see the puppies.

 

06:20 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah.

 

06:20 — Michael Beck:

So of all things at FS Tech that was new and exciting. It was the critters.

 

06:25 — Anthony Presley:

Well, you know, the hard part is a couple of things, but the real hard part is that there was a lot of backdrop displays that all say AI. And so it’s a little bit hard to suss out what’s actually AI, what you’re looking at there. The coolest thing, the most impressive tech that I saw was probably around some of the video and some of the folks again going back to optionality and choice where they’re setting up the infrastructure, they are bringing in the cameras, they’re capturing the data points and data elements, they’re extracting that data and then they’re providing it back so that you can use either their model or you can use someone else’s model. So that could be drive through timing, it could be inventory, it could be employees in need of refill glasses at a bar, it could be whatever.

 

07:18 — Anthony Presley:

But anyway, they’re providing basically the infrastructure layer and then an optional model. And that way you are not held hostage if you want to go somewhere else next year when your pricing runs out, you can do that.

 

07:27 — Michael Beck:

Sounds a little like our friends at Savvy. Yeah, well, there’s others, but there’s ones we like.

 

07:33 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, Savvy. Savvy’s good about that. But there’s a couple of others as well. So. Yeah.

 

07:38 — Chad Horn:

Chad, so I want to ask you about how all of this technology and changing technology, or the threat of change of technology interfaces with human habit.

 

07:51 — Anthony Presley:

Right.

 

07:51 — Chad Horn:

Because ultimately for a lot of things you need people to do a thing. People only get good at a thing if they’ve built it in the routine to become consistent with it. Then one day they might have to do something different because this AI changed this model, changed that vendor, did something weird. Right. And so how do you think about setting up a brand for success where it’s like the technology interfacing with the people and building those habits into their business?

 

08:15 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, that is a great question. Do you remember the staples easy button?

 

08:20 — Michael Beck:

Yes.

 

08:20 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, there’s not one. I really wish there was. This actually costs us deals because. Because I think there are some vendors that will tell you that they have the magic easy button. What you’re describing is change management.

 

08:35 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

08:35 — Michael Beck:

Right.

 

08:35 — Anthony Presley:

And it’s been around, it’s been a consulting word for hundreds of years. Right. This is not a new thing. And the other side of change management is trust.

 

08:48 — Chad Horn:

Because.

 

08:49 — Anthony Presley:

And we’re speeding up the change management and we’re speeding up the trust, or distrust as the case may be.

 

08:56 — Michael Beck:

Is it trust is going to get us where we’re going? What are they looking, what are you looking for the trust to hit on?

 

09:01 — Anthony Presley:

I think it’s trust that we believe in the, in where we’re going. Trust that I believe we’re going to get there as a brand, that we’re going to get where we want to go and then trust that the things you’ve provided to me are actually going to work. I was speaking, talking about new skin, old projects, that kind of Thing was just talking to a brand that’s here in Texas called 40 stores. They are on the hunt for a new back office solution. Why are they on a hunt for back office solution? That’s a great question. It turns out that they have both an inventory and a labor need and they want to use AI.

 

09:37 — Chad Horn:

So.

 

09:38 — Anthony Presley:

And I said, well, the product you have now has AI in it. And they said, yeah, that’s, we’ve had it though for four or five years. It’s got AI components, it’s doing automated forecasting, it’s doing automated replenishment. But there was this one time three years ago, it didn’t work. And so the managers lasting memory, the managers quit using it. They started using Excel. And so every week the IT department is looking at how accurate the system is. System has been accurate every week, very accurate for years. But this one time they got a software update, it didn’t work so well and they burned the trust.

 

10:17 — Chad Horn:

Wow.

 

10:18 — Anthony Presley:

And so now the answer at the executive level is we’re gonna have to replace it. I mean it’s the craziest. It’s, it’s change management either way.

 

10:26 — Chad Horn:

Just call it something else and say, hey, we have a new platform.

 

10:29 — Anthony Presley:

That’s right, that’s right. They could, they could, right? That button used to be blue, now it’s green. Does it work now?

 

10:35 — Chad Horn:

I don’t know.

 

10:36 — Anthony Presley:

So yeah. So I, but I think we’re dealing with that with the operators in mass, right where the change management is. Again, we’re going to put in a new product, we’re going to a new process. We have to make sure it works. It’s the same thing. We’ve been doing it just now. It’s around AI. I wish there was an easy button, it was super sexy, but it’s not. It’s the same stuff we’ve been doing for hundreds of years.

 

10:58 — Michael Beck:

So for somebody in a unique position. So you lead two companies, right? As a CTO of CBS Northstar, CEO of Time Forge, and thinking about what we just talked about, how are you looking at the solutions you’re putting the world and keeping that trust and delivering the things that people are expecting in a modern environment, like what’s the next thing coming? Or how are you preparing your organizations to take care of the growing expectation of delivery and the solutions you’re providing?

 

11:33 — Anthony Presley:

That is a great question. And I would tell you that we’re thinking about it a couple of ways, but I hate to be the stick in the mud, but you guys have been in the software industry For a long time. Do you know what the number one thing is that new software needs to be able to do work? Exactly the same thing. The old software, Right?

 

11:54 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

11:54 — Anthony Presley:

Isn’t that the number one thing? You know, by the way, we do this weird thing and whatever your new software is, I need the new thing. It needs to be hot, needs to be sexy, needs to be cheaper, it needs to have AI. And also it needs to do everything my old software did.

 

12:06 — Michael Beck:

But do you always want to do the old thing?

 

12:08 — Anthony Presley:

Well, that’s. That’s where you get enwrapped in these business processes. And it’s like, what got you here won’t get you there. That’s a nice phrase.

 

12:15 — Chad Horn:

Right.

 

12:17 — Anthony Presley:

And you know this whole deal about doing the same thing over and over again and never.

 

12:21 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

12:21 — Anthony Presley:

It’s insanity. Right.

 

12:22 — Michael Beck:

But in our industry, too, there’s so many things we’ve done as workarounds that were supposed to just be a temporary filling that turned into cement.

 

12:32 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah.

 

12:33 — Michael Beck:

And now they live with it as this, as if it’s gospel. And it was a great decision. Do you see that out there where you’re like, why do you have this calcified crap in your. In your world, you’re taking five steps when clearly it’s a linear move?

 

12:44 — Anthony Presley:

I was on a call on Tuesday with a very large multibillion dollar brand who told me that we needed to stop asking questions about how they did their loyalty rewards because they didn’t have the answers as to why the workflow worked the way that it was. It has just been going that way for them. Yeah. And they were like, look, you keep asking questions. It’s slowing down our deployment. And we’re asking questions going like, do we really want to build all this again? And it turns out. It turns out, yes, that’s exactly what they want to do is. And they don’t have answers for why. Insanity. Maybe a little bit. Yeah. I. But I also understand, like, everybody’s operating. One of the cool things. We’ll go back to the positive side. One of the cool things about the AI, though.

 

13:30 — Michael Beck:

Yes.

 

13:30 — Anthony Presley:

Is that it is allowing folks to experiment and play and jump in and build their own solutions. I don’t know that’s sustainable long term. But I think what’s interesting is that very much Claude, AI and all of that has allowed cloud code, has allowed software developers to basically get closer to being product managers or product managers to be developers. People who understand the core problem can now write code. And I think you’ve got a lot of operators that are forward thinking that are like, hey, I’m going to jump in and tell this computer exactly what I want. And they can then get exactly what they around all the cement, all the things that have solidified, get rid of that. For the forward looking operators now the question is how long term does that solution actually work?

 

14:20 — Chad Horn:

That’s the double edged sword.

 

14:22 — Anthony Presley:

That is it. Now, now you’re, now everybody’s a builder and at 2am when it doesn’t work, they’re calling you. Like you weren’t prepared for that call probably.

 

14:29 — Michael Beck:

Well, you and I were talking about that the other morning before we headed to the show. That was rocks analogy. You can drive a car with your feet, but it does make it a good idea.

 

14:36 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

14:37 — Michael Beck:

Do you think vendors are watching the market saying go ahead, code your own stuff, we’ll see in a little while.

 

14:45 — Anthony Presley:

You and I did talk about that. I just had this conversation with a 90 store operator.

 

14:49 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

14:50 — Anthony Presley:

And was very much like, okay, how do we protect ourselves as our division heads and so forth are building these products and then like six months, a year later like okay, well that was a fun experiment. Now let’s take the three features we actually need and go back to a vendor.

 

15:06 — Michael Beck:

Right.

 

15:07 — Anthony Presley:

And have the living.

 

15:08 — Chad Horn:

That’s right.

 

15:09 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

15:11 — Michael Beck:

Interesting.

 

15:11 — Anthony Presley:

I’m trying to remember exactly what he said his phrasing was, but it was similar to the two feet and you know, oh, that was, he was like, yeah. I mean I could fly commercial or I could buy this kid airplane. Right. And I can assemble the airplane and you know, in six or eight months I’ll get there. Or I could have.

 

15:28 — Michael Beck:

Or you may crash in flight because you’re not a freaking aerospace engineer.

 

15:32 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, that’s right.

 

15:33 — Chad Horn:

That’s right.

 

15:34 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah. I’ve always had the philosophy on my end is in any industry and you guys know I’ve worked in a number of industries. Right. But you should figure out what’s core to you. Yeah, core. And in most restaurants that’s making food.

 

15:49 — Michael Beck:

Right.

 

15:49 — Anthony Presley:

Delivering food.

 

15:50 — Michael Beck:

Right.

 

15:51 — Anthony Presley:

Having a fantastic experience. Those things are core. Making electricity is not core.

 

15:57 — Michael Beck:

Right.

 

15:58 — Anthony Presley:

Don’t, don’t get into the making electricity business. Like so now there are some tech that you know is kind of in the middle, you know, especially on the marketing tech side where you’re talking about experience with your guest or your customer or your employees. All the personalization I can, you know, but like do you really need to be vibe coding compliance stuff for payroll? Probably not.

 

16:20 — Michael Beck:

Well, it’s like Saying chat GBT gave me. I. I have an arrhythmia in my heart, but chat GPT told me how to. And I have a scalpel.

 

16:30 — Anthony Presley:

Let’s go.

 

16:31 — Chad Horn:

Right.

 

16:32 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, yeah. Experts.

 

16:34 — Michael Beck:

Yeah, exactly.

 

16:35 — Chad Horn:

Yeah. I want to paraphrase a conversation I heard upstairs and then ask you a question about it. Conversation with this. It’s really hard being an operator. Really hard. Being a restaurant tech company. Even harder making money at either. So why do you do it, Anthony?

 

16:52 — Anthony Presley:

Oh, that is a great. Yeah. We were talking about a Venn diagram.

 

16:56 — Michael Beck:

Of.

 

16:58 — Anthony Presley:

Making software for restaurants. Of technology making software for restaurants or making food. And you Venn diagram them together and you end up with this. What are we. What are we doing, guys? No, I. That’s a great question. Why do I do this?

 

17:16 — Chad Horn:

This is where his new career began, everybody. He’s gonna.

 

17:20 — Michael Beck:

I never thought of that.

 

17:21 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, no, it’s a. It’s a. Because they’re. They’re genuinely hard problems. Yeah, they’re really hard problems. And I think oftentimes both vendors and operators will overplay how hard they are and go, oh, how hard can it be? It’s really freaking hard to get that guest to come back a second time.

 

17:43 — Chad Horn:

Yep.

 

17:44 — Anthony Presley:

Really hard. And keep coming back on a routine, frequent basis. That’s really hard. Likewise, it’s really hard to produce numbers week after week after week on a sales forecast that are actually accurate. That’s really hard. There’s no amount of AI that’s just like, oh, this is magic. And we know this because there are billion dollar companies, trillion dollar companies now that don’t get it right every day.

 

18:09 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

18:10 — Anthony Presley:

And sometimes we forget that. Yeah. Like, you know, I’ve got a small restaurant and, you know, this thing doesn’t work. This is ridiculous. Well, you know, I don’t know about y’, all, but Microsoft puts out bugs all the time. So anyway, they’re hard problems. I enjoy hard problems. I guess it’s why I’m still here in the fight.

 

18:29 — Michael Beck:

So FS Tech’s in your backyard. It’s an easy drive, justifiable by proximity.

 

18:35 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah. Like 14 minutes.

 

18:36 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

18:36 — Michael Beck:

Yeah, something like that.

 

18:37 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah.

 

18:39 — Michael Beck:

And I think one of the elephants in the room is, while there’s some wonderful shows out there, the costs aren’t going down to get in. Some of the smaller shows in some cases are more expensive than the bigger shows. Do you think we’re at a bubble moment on events where people are going to start saying, we can’t do all these things? We can’t go to all these Events just because of sheer costs and the weight of the costs that are here. And is there a solution to that?

 

19:09 — Anthony Presley:

I have heard probably more grumblings at this show than I have in a long time. It may just be it’s the start of the show season again.

 

19:18 — Chad Horn:

Yeah, sure.

 

19:20 — Anthony Presley:

That. Of the costs going up and frankly of those, the vendors sharing with the operators how expensive it is because I don’t know that most of the operators realize what it costs to just get a badge and walk around a show.

 

19:34 — Michael Beck:

Oh, yeah. Or it’s like being a pretty girl at a bar. You’re not buying your drinks.

 

19:38 — Anthony Presley:

That’s right. That’s exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone else is buying my steak dinner and that’s fine. And I get that 100%. There is always been a level of pay to play.

 

19:49 — Michael Beck:

Right.

 

19:50 — Anthony Presley:

But I. There’s two things that have happened with that, I think. One, bootstrapped companies, software companies, and to some degree even operators who are building restaurant brands. You know, it’s. The cost has gone up for them as well. Right. Coming to a show, being out of pocket, you know, all of that’s more expensive. So I think. But because the cost has gone up for folks who are, we’ll call it smaller startups, it may also lead to a lack of some of the innovation that we see on the show floor. Because the only way you’re going to be able to write a $15,000 check and what. Whatever it is to have a booth is to have enough cash flow for that to make sense. Right. And so I think some of the smaller vendors don’t get to play.

 

20:35 — Anthony Presley:

That’s a little bit of the nature of the beast. But, but at the same point in time, that means that the operators who are looking for innovation really are going to get limited to whoever the big guys are that can write the check. Right. So it’s. It’s like that saying, like, we only hire the top 1% of employees. Well, no, that’s crap. You only hire the top 1% of employees that applied to your job. Right, Right. So like that. You’ve already got a smaller pool to begin with. So, yeah, So I think that the cost going up is. Is definitely a problem. It’s a problem on both sides of the house.

 

21:05 — Anthony Presley:

And then I think that then becomes more selective and there’s going to be fewer big lavish dinners and, you know, because you have to justify the spend and it’s going to create your points less attendance at various shows. It creates less attendance from the operators who are Having to choose which ones to go to because costs have gone up.

 

21:25 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

21:26 — Anthony Presley:

And so that may end up being more regional and less of the big bang and the, you know, I don’t know what that’s going to end up being, but fewer airplanes. Yeah, yeah. Yes, definitely.

 

21:35 — Michael Beck:

When Covid was kicking off, everybody ran to digital. We all remember the digital mixers. We’d have the virtual cocktail hours. But do you think there’s some kind of compromise in there where a show like a FSTECH or QSR Evolution whose prices doubled last year. We love that show. Their prices literally doubled.

 

21:57 — Chad Horn:

Right.

 

21:58 — Michael Beck:

That there may be a hybrid for those that can’t afford to go but could do some clever placement of some form of advertising content on these, supporting these show websites have some sort of admission to the keynote so they could learn for their people. So the ones that can’t go can still attend and the shows can still have some sort of revenue stream by creating digital access to these things for the people that just can’t make it but still want to show. Like, here’s our startups that couldn’t be here but ch guys out. Do you think that’s an option?

 

22:30 — Anthony Presley:

I think it.

 

22:30 — Michael Beck:

Or is it overproduction and causes more burden for the show to deliver it?

 

22:35 — Anthony Presley:

I, I’m just thinking about all the virtual shows I’ve gone to and I’m a tech geek so it turns out that like Microsoft does virtual shows all the time.

 

22:44 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

22:44 — Anthony Presley:

So a lot of tech people that go to them, so. But we’re in the hospitality industry and everybody likes to wine and dine, you know. You know, we, as you guys know, we operate in the grocery industry as well.

 

22:57 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

22:58 — Anthony Presley:

Nobody’s doing hot dog races midnight on a grocery show. It doesn’t happen.

 

23:03 — Michael Beck:

You’re not going to find it in the finance conference.

 

23:05 — Anthony Presley:

It’s not there.

 

23:06 — Michael Beck:

Well, suits don’t run very well.

 

23:08 — Anthony Presley:

So. So I think there is some level of camaraderie that like that is in the hospitality industry.

 

23:15 — Michael Beck:

I’ve heard called a reunion so many more times than a show.

 

23:18 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, right. What’s a six? A high school.

 

23:22 — Michael Beck:

You share this with me. I get it for the audience. What do you mean?

 

23:25 — Anthony Presley:

Well, like the decision makers in the restaurant industry, I think you can, you could probably put about 3,000. I mean there are obviously lots of one store operators, two store operators. But you go, hey look, we’ve got 20 stores or more. How many of those brands are there? You guys know the stats, right? A couple thousand. And so, you know, you put all those CIOs in one high school. You put the CEOs in high school, you put CMOs in high school and you’re, you know, whatever. You got like six 6A high schools.

 

23:58 — Michael Beck:

Got it right.

 

23:59 — Anthony Presley:

So all your decision making is, is going on there.

 

24:04 — Michael Beck:

So we’ll do a little dance here for the podcast.

 

24:06 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

24:07 — Anthony Presley:

Love it. Love it.

 

24:12 — Michael Beck:

So ap, let’s take a moment to shine a light on the things that you guys are doing at both Time Forge and cbs. And really, you know, for. On the CBS side of things. I know that because I used to work over there and that’s actually how we met. Tell me a little bit about where the North Star product has gone, where it’s going, what’s exciting about that and why should people should start looking at the solutions that you guys are offering.

 

24:40 — Anthony Presley:

Great. So I like, I love a plug.

 

24:43 — Michael Beck:

I love the plug too.

 

24:44 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, yeah. We continue to focus on being the best at order management. So we started in table service. We continue to be in Excel in table service, which means ordering at the table, leave behind payment devices, all the different kinds of workflows that go in there. Start a tab at the bar, transfer it to a table, you know, have that opened and open table or resi or something. So we know exactly who the guest is all the way through the entire experience. Notifying a manager that a high value VIP is there. You know, we want to compliment dessert. We want to, you know, so really focusing on, we’ll call it table service, high end fine dining enterprise brands. This year, last quarter, we’ve put together our Android app, which is kind of fun. So unlike how many others are doing it.

 

25:42 — Anthony Presley:

We actually wrote and read. It’s very techy, but we redid all the source code in a manner that can be deployed exactly the same. The same user interface on Android, Windows or iOS. And so now you can start to run the best device. If you need an iPad mini or you need a small Android device, you need a big Android device, or you need a. You’re a brand that has millions of dollars of old Windows equipment. You can run the same pos. It’s the same training experience, it’s the same user interface all the way through, which is pretty unique.

 

26:16 — Michael Beck:

Very cool.

 

26:17 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah.

 

26:17 — Michael Beck:

And on the Time Forge side.

 

26:19 — Anthony Presley:

Oh, Time Forge is all about the employees, right?

 

26:21 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

26:22 — Anthony Presley:

Workforce management. We continue to laser in on the evergreen topic in this industry, which is finding the right employee, having the right employees work and then rewarding them so they don’t leave. I mean. Yeah.

 

26:38 — Michael Beck:

And yesterday when were sitting there with some friends that came by and I shared, because I knew this about you guys, that you guys have. It’s very robust labor tool that sometimes other labor tools come to find you because of the rules sets you have, like around Fair work Week and other things that you’d see in like California or New York or Washington.

 

26:57 — Chad Horn:

Right.

 

26:58 — Michael Beck:

Why do you think that you. I mean, you guys leaned into it, built it. It’s fantastic. Why aren’t other labor solutions creating that same thing? Because the compliance is so important.

 

27:07 — Chad Horn:

Why didn’t.

 

27:08 — Michael Beck:

Why don’t they go down those roads? Why aren’t they building the thing that you have? I don’t want your secret sauce. I want to know why they’re not. Why they’re not doing something that seems like, you got to get this is critical.

 

27:18 — Anthony Presley:

We took a turn. I think it depends on the icp. It depends on who you’re going after. There are some fantastic labor tools on the market. They had booths here. I’ve known the CEOs of those companies for. Since they got started.

 

27:31 — Michael Beck:

See, we don’t negative sell.

 

27:32 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, yeah. It is what it is.

 

27:34 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

27:35 — Anthony Presley:

And they’re great. And I would say, especially in franchise groups where you have. You don’t have big sprawling franchise groups. Obviously there are some of those, but most folks have one or two stores or three stores. And some of these rules, like a fair work week, don’t come into play. And so if your target audience. How many, how many restaurants do we think there are in the US right now? 600,000? 700,000?

 

27:58 — Michael Beck:

8 Million if you count independence. And depends on corporate.

 

28:02 — Anthony Presley:

What are we counting? Right. Yeah.

 

28:03 — Chad Horn:

So that.

 

28:03 — Anthony Presley:

What are we counting? Right. Is a. Is a coffee shop at ikea. Is that a restaurant?

 

28:08 — Chad Horn:

I don’t know. Yes.

 

28:09 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, exactly. It’s counted, right? Yeah, yeah. Cruise ships.

 

28:13 — Michael Beck:

Right.

 

28:13 — Anthony Presley:

Hotel, lobbies, all that. So let’s call it a million. That’s fine. How many of those are independence?

 

28:19 — Michael Beck:

About half.

 

28:19 — Anthony Presley:

Right, Right. And then have less than five stores.

 

28:22 — Chad Horn:

We’re.

 

28:23 — Anthony Presley:

We’re suddenly, you know, there’s only maybe 200, 000 left.

 

28:26 — Michael Beck:

Yep, yep.

 

28:26 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah. So I think that, you know, most labor tools in the market are designed to go after the large majority. And then there’s fewer and fewer that are going after where the compliance really comes into play, which is, we’ll call them the larger guys. And the hard part, of course, is back to that change management is you catch somebody who’s growing, they’ve chosen a small player or someone who targets small players and then as they get bigger they end up with all kinds of fines and new problems and class action lawsuits that they weren’t prepared for.

 

29:00 — Michael Beck:

So that’s just planning for growth then. Or understanding where you’re going to go. If you’re going to stay here for X amount of years, maybe that’s a good fit for you.

 

29:07 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

29:07 — Michael Beck:

If you, if you have plans for rapid expansion.

 

29:09 — Chad Horn:

Yeah.

 

29:10 — Michael Beck:

Or you’re neighboring a state that has these kind of fun things going on, you should probably plan ahead for that.

 

29:15 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah. I think, and I think that goes for all tech. Right. Not just, not just, I mean you and you we’ve talked about on the POS side like there’s a lot of, or loyalty or any of these solutions. Right. They’re, they’re great fit. When you’re one store or three stores or five stores and then you get to 80 stores, you’re like oh what are we doing? This is too much overhead or it doesn’t have these features we need which is inevitably there’s a checkbox. You need that. It needs to turn something on.

 

29:39 — Chad Horn:

Chad. So this next question, let’s limit the set to multi units. 20 Plus units. Right.

 

29:46 — Anthony Presley:

20 Plus.

 

29:47 — Chad Horn:

And this whole platform best of breed versus best in class kind of thing that conversation. What are the categories of technology where good isn’t good enough? Best of. You need the best in class if you’re going to be real serious.

 

30:06 — Anthony Presley:

I think it depends on how to.

 

30:08 — Chad Horn:

Offer it.

 

30:11 — Anthony Presley:

And I think it’s very dependent on your customer base as a restaurant brand. So if your customer base is price sensitive or is very drawn to rewards and you’ve probably trained them to be that way, by the way, neither here nor there, then you probably need the very best rewards system because that’s what your customer base that drives your revenue. Right. When we flip the script here, the question is what’s driving your revenue? And so those are the things that really matter to that brand. On the other hand, if you’re very high touch your high end steakhouse, whatever, you got 20 of them and then maybe that doesn’t matter and having a really crummy reward system is fine. You may not even have a reward system. Right, Right. So and it’s interesting as the.

 

31:10 — Anthony Presley:

I used to have an argument with another, a LinkedIn influencer from Time to time about, you know, that the market was going to split up into what they called ordering right back of house and guest engagement. Right. That there would be three Categories. That is not what’s happened in the market. Right. What’s happened in the market is this consolidation around the platforms.

 

31:31 — Chad Horn:

Right.

 

31:32 — Anthony Presley:

And you have platforms from big publicly traded companies and then there’s these APIs that may or may not be sufficient to plug in. One of my favorite one is this simple example of one of the. We’ll leave these folks nameless, right?

 

31:47 — Michael Beck:

Yes.

 

31:47 — Anthony Presley:

We’ll protect.

 

31:48 — Michael Beck:

Yes, yes.

 

31:49 — Anthony Presley:

And so they have the ability as an API vendor to read who created a check in the system, but you can’t read from the data who closed the check or who took the payment. So if you wanted to distribute tips and you don’t want to use their platform solution, your business now only has the ability to do tip pooling based on who opens a check, not who took the payment. Right. So now you have to turn your operations around to use a best of breed type solution, which again, back to that. How do you operate that platform? The platform is going to solve your solution better than a point solution. But that’s a fake guardrail that was created by the platform.

 

32:38 — Chad Horn:

Right.

 

32:38 — Anthony Presley:

To keep you there. Does that answer.

 

32:42 — Chad Horn:

Oh, yes.

 

32:43 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah.

 

32:43 — Chad Horn:

Do you think I’m going to see each concept?

 

32:46 — Michael Beck:

Do you think in the platform game, eggs in one basket is a risk, right. That they. We can cover all your needs?

 

32:55 — Anthony Presley:

Absolutely.

 

32:56 — Michael Beck:

We can take care of your pos, we can take care of your back office. Take care.

 

32:59 — Anthony Presley:

Take care, take care.

 

33:02 — Michael Beck:

Is there risk in that? Is there a risk in the vendor relationship failing and now you’re stuck with this thing or what is the safe move when we’re looking at platforms?

 

33:12 — Anthony Presley:

My view of that is a couple fold. One is that anybody who’s not public, and this still applies for public companies, but less so. But anyway, it’s not public. You kind of got to be worried about changing of the guard. Right? Because acquired by private equity, acquired by venture capital, you’ve got, you got some concerns there, so you got to watch out for that. Secondly, you know, attorneys can pay for whatever you want in a paper, but also getting tied up in a lawsuit’s not much fun. But I do think that you need to be very careful about long term. I was speaking yesterday to a brand’s got thousand plus locations and were discussing that they often have vendors come to them and go, hey, we’re going to give you a heck of a deal for our AI platform for three years.

 

34:03 — Anthony Presley:

Like, well, okay, well what happens in three years? Like, right. Yeah, yeah, my price.

 

34:09 — Michael Beck:

You know what?

 

34:09 — Anthony Presley:

That’s right back. Change management. Right We’ve already trained everybody. Assuming it’s working well, then I’ve got to go untrain everybody and roll out a new thing. It’s going to take some time.

 

34:19 — Michael Beck:

So brain surgery, at that point you’re trying to extract something that is.

 

34:22 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah.

 

34:23 — Michael Beck:

Intricately integrated to everything.

 

34:24 — Anthony Presley:

And I think people often Forget like a 3 year contract seems like a long time. But if you’re going to rip something out and you’re going to have to you get, do that in two years because you’re going to need a year to get all your stores up and running and go through pilot and validation. And then what happens if the program you chose sucks, then you got to get a different one. Like you need time and three years seems like a long time, but it’s not. So these three year deals, five year deals. I know of one brand that has moved everything to month so that they are making now it’s a little scary because pricing could change.

 

34:54 — Michael Beck:

But yes.

 

34:54 — Anthony Presley:

He’s like, I’m not going to get locked into any of these deals because the VC world is moving too fast and my vendors are getting acquired and so I don’t want to be locked in with these guys. And so I thought that was interesting. But you also, to your point, relationships matter. That’s back to the 6A high school. Like that’s what this, the relationships and the personalities and all of that. And you sign a deal with Mr. Beck and then next thing you know you’re dealing with Chad and it’s like, well, I don’t, you know, that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

 

35:24 — Chad Horn:

So. Yeah.

 

35:25 — Michael Beck:

Complicated subjects.

 

35:27 — Chad Horn:

Right.

 

35:27 — Michael Beck:

It sounds good on paper. Oh, like it’s all in one.

 

35:31 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah.

 

35:31 — Michael Beck:

Do you think they get. I mean now that we’re learning all these things, do you think they can across the board a platform company can do all things equally.

 

35:40 — Anthony Presley:

Well, no. Like back did I hesitate?

 

35:43 — Michael Beck:

Like POS is funny. Like we have inventory. But do you.

 

35:47 — Anthony Presley:

Right, right. And even now like, but the difference between different pieces of inventory is like is it. But like ignore the, ignore restaurant tech for just.

 

35:55 — Chad Horn:

Sure.

 

35:56 — Anthony Presley:

Let’s just ignore it.

 

35:57 — Chad Horn:

Sure.

 

35:59 — Anthony Presley:

What is the best all in one car that you’ve ever seen?

 

36:03 — Michael Beck:

What is an all in one car?

 

36:04 — Anthony Presley:

Well, something that can tow your boat and do four wheel drive.

 

36:08 — Michael Beck:

Okay.

 

36:08 — Anthony Presley:

And beat a Corvette off the line and also should be able to haul six kids.

 

36:13 — Chad Horn:

Yeah, of course.

 

36:14 — Michael Beck:

Yeah, I know.

 

36:15 — Anthony Presley:

You don’t have one of those, do you? No. Yeah. Well, what’s the best all in one software you use on your phone. Do you have any all in one software? I mean something hidden task management, email, calendar, takes voice notes, phone calls.

 

36:30 — Michael Beck:

I hate it.

 

36:32 — Anthony Presley:

Yeah, it’s so interesting. Like you know. Okay, well let’s think about all in one business software. Ignore the restaurant. Like Salesforce, Microsoft, like, I mean, no, it turns out they’re not like I, you know, we’re going after these things that like we say these words. Right. They don’t exist. Have the same conversation. We just talked about breaking up the market into icps. Like I would love to find someone who is the best at a one store install and also is perfect for Chick Fil. A also that doesn’t exist.

 

37:03 — Michael Beck:

Not so much.

 

37:04 — Anthony Presley:

And it’s not just in our industry, but like what is the best for my two person consulting company and Boeing?

 

37:14 — Michael Beck:

That’s a really good point.

 

37:15 — Anthony Presley:

I mean it doesn’t exist.

 

37:16 — Chad Horn:

Right.

 

37:16 — Anthony Presley:

Because as you go up market in enterprise you have to add features because that changes how they operate. And as you go down market, you have to simplify it and make it very simple because they don’t have the staff to manage and maintain it.

 

37:29 — Michael Beck:

Yeah.

 

37:29 — Anthony Presley:

And they got other things going on. They don’t want to be clicking on boxes. No one has won that. Now there are some folks in our category that think they are going to win this race, but I don’t think it exists in any industry.

 

37:41 — Chad Horn:

Yeah, product category.

 

37:44 — Michael Beck:

It’s one of the best takes we had right here. That’s a solid observation. Well, I know we gotta wrap up here. They’re waiting to take our table away. We are literally, and I love this that we’re one of the first ones in, the last ones out. We usually come kicking and screaming, dragging at least one more interview out of the show just to get as much as we can because we’re so eager to learn, but more so eager to share this kind of content with you guys, help you think about some of these things that are going on out there. And as you listen to the podcast that we share, we encourage you to chime in, have a comment. Let’s make this a dialogue, not a one way thing. We’re just speaking to you guys about stuff.

 

38:19 — Michael Beck:

We want to hear what you have to say. We want to hear your pushback on any of the sentiments we have and maybe we learned something from you in turn. But for now, thanks for joining Chad, Presley, and myself here at the FS Tech Show. It’s been our honor to be able to share our content with you as our community and we’re honored to have you as part of our community. And if you’re not subscribed, click that subscribe button. Click that follow on LinkedIn. We’d love to have you along for the journey, but like I said, for now, Chad, Presley, and Beck signing off. We’ll see you guys in the next one. We don’t know where it will be or when it’s going to happen, but stay tuned for more. Take care everybody.

 

38:52 — Anthony Presley:

Later.

 

38:54 — Michael Beck:

Thank you for joining us for this edition of the Chat GTM podcast. Every week we’re sitting down with founders, operators and the best selling authors for shaping the future of our industry. For more exclusive content, follow us on LinkedIn, subscribe on YouTube and be sure to listen wherever your pods are being served. A special thank you to our guests and partners for making the show possible. And remember, the best go to market strategy isn’t about fitting in, it’s giving people a reason to notice. So embrace your weird interrupt the pattern and let your freak flag fly.